Page:Lesbia Newman - Dalton - 1889.djvu/294

 ‘If, Miss Newman,’ he replied, slowly and earnestly, ‘I were to reply, by putting an end to what is commonly called the social evil, you would tell me that I am a dreamer, and that my project is Utopia. You would say the hundred thousand women who nightly crowd the pavement of this vast metropolis are not to be diverted from their courses, be they good or bad, by a musical performance in a church, under a name taken from a Greek historian, and connected with the preaching of doctrines which, right or wrong, are ‘Greek’ to them. So be it. I am aware of that. But all movements for the amelioration of society have small beginnings; and it seems to me that the soundest of beginnings is example, example set by the classes who are supposed to have paid for and obtained a superior education. It is my belief that if the ladies, or some of them, whose influence over what is called ‘good society’ determines the moral code of the sphere wherein they habitually move—if these ladies can be induced to think, and to let the world know that they think, that the old code of morals as between the sexes is a mischievous error throughout, and that the right or wrong of these inclinations consists in their use or their abuse, their use for the elevation of woman in Divine Order—’

‘I am glad to hear you employ the right word, Mr Mountjoy,’ interrupted Mr Bristley.

‘Their use for her elevation,’ resumed the other, ‘their abuse for her degradation, then I contend that the world of fashion will soon shift its couches, and fall in with the newer and nobler mortalitymorality [sic], and ‘a new heart and a new spirit’ will come to it, and it will recognise in enlightened women its true teachers, and will commit to the flames its old false and foolish notions, and the false religion upon which they rested.

‘Time they did!’ exclaimed Mr Bristley. ‘When I think of all the sickly twaddle hawked about by those blubberly